Prompt response: Liminal
Prompt: City
Title: Liminal
Notes: Ynez is my own.
Word count: 620ish
Liminal
The world feels new. The world is new. Her father’s home is familiar and completely foreign at the same time. The little house she grew up in, her bedroom, the window she’d crept out so many times while she was growing up: it all feels like a dream.
This world is a dream. The one she left behind was real.
And when she sleeps, Tlalocan. Hummingbird wings and infernal heat, just like the desert she so recently departed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Las Vegas was a blur. Loud. Brightly-lit. She stumbled out of the dawn and walked up to the isolated house. A man opened the door. The way needs a guardian, after all. The man is more than he appears, so much more. She showed him the tattooed eye in her hand and he let her into his home without a word.
Just as well. At that moment, the only language she remembered had not been spoken in this world for generations.
While she waited for someone to come get her, Ynez took a bath, the first one in a long time. It felt odd and uncomfortable, an extravagant waste of water. She gently patted and splashed the cooling liquid, crooning to herself. Gooseflesh crept across her skin. She thought about expensive bath oils and shampoo, remembered her pleasure.
All she had to wear afterwards were the same dirty clothes.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ynez watches television with Lupe in the evening and tries to think about how to speak English. Sometimes it’s there. Sometime it isn’t.
Early Mass every Sunday. She gazes up at the stained glass and pretends she has never seen it before. Each time, a happy father greets his prodigal son, his face lit with joy and the morning light of Los Angeles. On one side behind the joyous reunion, a fatted calf looks up in the direction of the sky, seeing who knows what? You are the sacrifice to mark the celebration, my friend. And on the other side, the killjoy son, the passive aggressive, self-pitying lout, the one who thinks he deserves credit just for doing what he is supposed to do, even when he would rather not. His father’s back is turned to him. His face is suffused with jealousy and rage.
At least that’s what Ynez sees there.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
She goes out the window at night again, boneless and sinuous a cat. Going down the side of the house is easier now than it ever was, cling there, dig your fingers in, drop that last eight feet. When she lands right, her hip doesn’t feel it.
She doesn’t always land right.
Los Angeles haze and streetlights hide the stars in the sky. She lies on the ground near the garden, closes her eyes and smells the green. She appreciates it now more than ever, even though she can always feel the death right beneath the busy surface. During the day, she helps Tía Maria with the tomatoes and peppers. The harvest is just beginning.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One time and one time only she calls the apartment in New York. The phone rings twice before she hangs up. The point is not whether Darius is there or not. If she truly wanted an answer, she would call his cell phone.
No, the point is that until she knows, he is both there and not there, a waveform of infinite possibilities. All futures are open to them that way. Once she goes back, the waveform will collapse and Ynez will learn the truth. Her future will be revealed.
Ynez knows how to love past the point of reason. What she does not know is whether that will be enough or whether something completely new will emerge from the damage she has done.